How to Find Unencrypted or Public AWS EC2 Snapshots

When you share a snapshot, you are giving others access to all the data on the snapshot. Share snapshots only with people with whom you want to share all of your snapshot data.

info

This security check is part of the CIS Amazon Web Services Benchmarks and is rated severity medium.

Prerequisites

This guide assumes that you have already installed and configured Fix Inventory to collect your AWS resources.

Directions

1. Execute the following search command in Fix Inventory Shell:

   > search is(aws_ec2_snapshot) and encrypted=false
   ​kind=aws_ec2_snapshot, ..., region=fixinventory-poweruser
   ​kind=aws_ec2_snapshot, ..., account=poweruser-team

2. Pipe the search command into the dump command:

   > search is(aws_ec2_snapshot) and encrypted=false | dump
   ​reported:
   ​  id: /aws/ec2/123
   ​  name: some-name
   ​  ctime: '2022-12-05T22:53:14Z'
   ​  kind: aws_ec2_snapshot
   ​  age: 2mo28d

   The command output will list the details of all non-compliant aws_ec2_snapshot resources.

Remediation

Enable encryption of snapshots.

note

Please refer to the AWS EC2 documentation for details.

Further Reading

• Search
• Command-Line Interface
• aws_ec2_snapshot Resource Data Model

External Links

• CIS Amazon Web Services Benchmarks
• AWS Documentation